N.Z. PRIEST’S LONELY JOB ON REMOTE PACIFIC ATOLL

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22694, 20 July 1948, Page 5

N.Z. PRIEST’S LONELY JOB ON REMOTE PACIFIC ATOLL

11.M.N.Z.5. BELLONA, July 18

A man with one of the loneliest jobs in the world is travelling in the cruiser Bellona to resume his work on the tiny Pacific atoll of Nukunono. He is the Rev. Father Alec MacDonald, a New Zealander from Wanganui, who, on leaving the ship today will not see a fellow white man for, perhaps, three or six months.

His nearest European neighbours will be in Samoa, 300 miles away. , Father MacDonald’s mission station lies in the remote Tokolau Group, a few degrees south of the Equator. Eight months ago Nukunono’s first European priest was removed from the island in H.M.N.Z.S. Arbutus suffering from a severe attack of vitamin deficiency disease known as beriberi. Father MacDonald, who is a member of the Marist Order, was chosen to succeed him and for six months he lived among the little community of 400 natives without any contact with Europeans. Breakdown of Radio Set

Their only normal brush with western civilisation is when a schooner from Apia calls once or twice a year to load the local crop of copra. Blackbirding Days Recalled

Older men In the community still speak of piratical forays by blackbirders 70 years ago, when many men and women were shanghaied into forced labour in the salt and guano mines of South America. In Ataiu, another similar island of the Tokolau Group, all but one man arc reputed to have been removed and the community had to be re-established with immigrants from the Gilbert Group. Except for luxuries of tinned meat and ship biscuits brought by the copra schooners, the Nukunona islanders are self supporting. Their diet consists essentially of fish with which the water abounds, coconuts, breadfruit and a rare meal of chicken or pork. Until recently eggs were ignored as food and. even today, they are regarded with the greatest suspicion by the older people. Lack of Water Supply

Frail outrigger canoes, sewn together with coconut fibre from an odd assortment of local timbers, were his sole means of transport. Only his radio around which the natives still congregate in amazement, kept Father MacDonald in touch with world events. For three months, due to a technical fault even this link was severed.

“For a week or two, the complete lack of knowledge of outside events seemed unbearable,” he remarked today. "After that it did not seem to matter. •

“Even when I returned to Apia this month for a fortnight, I was so busy accumulating stores and making arrangements for my return to the mission there seemed to be no time to catch up with what had been happening.” The Nukunono natives use the dialect of the Samoan in which Father MacDonald, after six years’ service in the Samoan mission field, is a fluent speaker. An entirely Catholic community, they live the same simple existence followed py their forefathers centuries before.

In common with most other atolls of the group, Nukunono has no running water. The erratic rainfall, which is captured and stored in tanks and cisterms, sometimes leaves the islanders perilously short of drinking water. The population, including the missioner, then falls back on the inexhaustible store of coconut milk. One of Father MacDonald's immediate tasks is the building of a convent. When it is completed the sisters of the Marist Order are expected from Samoa to establish a house with the object of providing general education for the youth of the isolated community.